SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. Still doesn’t answer your question? LOL (that stands for Laugh Out Loud). When it comes to terms like SEO, SERPs, ranking, keywords, organic search, PPC advertising, and link building (to name a few), you may feel about as out of your element as you do when trying to decipher your teenager’s latest text messages. New terms seem to pop up all the time and can get quite confusing. Not to worry; we’re here to help! Well… probably not with your teen’s text messages (that’s another subject altogether); but as for the rest, read on: answers await!

Simply put, Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your website the most popular of the crowd. It’s how to get your website recognized as being more important than AND ranked by search engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing) higher than your competitors’ websites. Highest ranked sites obviously appear in searches first, with the rest of the sites following according to their ranking order.

Search engines have several different jobs to do: crawl the web (check out the place), build indexes (take notes of the place), analyze site relevancy to calculate rank (determine who is popular), and provide search results (based on who is popular). In order to determine site popularity, search engines are capable of “considering” numerous factors, such as the number of links to and from your site, keyword usage on your site (as a whole and on its pages), overall site content, traffic (or visitors) to your site, and more.

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